Hi Peter,
Thank you for sharing your knowledge! I think it should reach a larger audience. In my opinion, that’s a great base for a separate story where you share practical tips on how to organise and plan your learning process, the lessons you’ve learned while doing it and the approach you took to fix any issues that you’ve noticed in your workflow!
The amount of work you did is actually astonishing :)
And as a user of Git and GitHub I can say the same. I’m always motivated and inspired by the visual representation of the data I created as a side effect of programming.
As for my transition, it wasn’t that difficult for me, because I was freelancing for most of my career. I’ve got some experience in guiding my clients from their initial idea to final result.
My transition started after I had a talk with my friend who knows me well. She pointed out to me that I seem to enjoy the creative process that comes before the actual coding way more than the production/development part.
The approach I undertook from the start was very methodical (you will certainly understand what that means).
I started by expanding my knowledge by reading a lot, especially here on Medium. I always take a lot of notes in the form of bullet points with multiple levels of indentation (I use Bear app for that). This allows me to draw an outline of each area I’m focusing on and then dig deeper by asking questions and filling the gaps I notice. It’s quite similar to mind mapping. I can’t use pen and paper methods because of this.
I also started my first exclusively UX project — an app for my favourite basketball team. The goal is to attract more people to attend the matches. I’ve got access to the current fan base of the team so I can easily run studies and surveys. They are very helpful.
I’m also writing here on Medium about my journey and I find it a great way to systematize my knowledge.
Everything I do right now in terms of practicing UX, I try to measure as well. I’ve set up spreadsheets where I note how long it takes me to accomplish a task, what’s my conversion rate for each survey I run, etc. This allows me to actually be able to answer how consistent I am. If someone asks me: “How many people fill your surveys?” I can easily look it up and say “Around 30%”. Having a number ready is a great starting point to look for ways to improve my workflow.
Right now I’m at a point where I’m focusing on increasing the volume of my output. Instead of focusing on polishing everything to be 100% perfect, I rather iterate and open up myself to more opportunities to gain experience without sacrificing on quality. From my experience, there’s a threshold after which spending more time on something stops productivity and provides no visible gains.
Kind regards,
Pawel
